Video sponsoring is a dominant advertising format for the internet. Sites such as YouTube™ are starting to generate advertisements added to video content. Online video advertisements are typically “linear” or in-stream advertisements, such as pre-rolls, mid-rolls or post-rolls for the video content, or “non-linear” advertisements, which appear “parallel” to the video content so that users see the advertisement whilst viewing the video content. Examples of non-linear advertisements are video overlays or roll-overs. “Long-form” video advertisements, which typically run for over a minute and are similar to infomercials, are also becoming increasingly popular as an online advertising option. These online advertisements are typically priced on CPM basis, for example £80 for every 1000 advertisements viewed by recipients. Pricing of such ads varies considerably as price is typically defined by auction or by an amount of targeting information available.
Another growing area of interest for advertisers is “mobile marketing,” which involves and relates to marketing and advertising via mobile devices, e.g., phones, smart phones, and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), or any other computer device configured to be able to receive or send data wirelessly, receiving promotional material, i.e., marketing and/or advertising content in the form of, e.g., text, audio, video or some combination thereof associated with a particular product, service or combination thereof. Mobile advertising is advantageous for advertisers, as compared to browsing, actively sending messages to mobile devices guarantees a number of advertisements delivered and viewed, compared to relying on recipients to go online to watch internet advertisements.
Ensuring that a target audience is being effectively exposed to advertising material is a key issue of any advertising or marketing activity, whether it is in the field of direct marketing or brand advertising. Mobile marketing enables advertisers to directly reach individual recipients in a targeted way. This is because the nature of mobile media is personal, in that mobile devices are generally used by a particular individual rather than a group of individuals. Further, mobile media is, by definition, mobile, which offers a transportable mechanism for exposing potential recipients to promotional material. Moreover, because mobile media is “always on”, advertisers are not constrained by the need to make a connection in order to deliver promotional material to a user's device because a connection is always established with a user's mobile device (provided the mobile device is in range of an available communication network).
However, there is a cost associated with this targeted distribution of promotional material. Typically the cost is associated with delivery of a direct advertisement message to a targeted individual (i.e., someone who has the attributes identified in an advertising campaign) by direct marketing, or media space in brand advertising. Therefore, an advertiser will attempt to ensure that promotional material is distributed effectively to ensure that the targeted individual is exposed to the promotional material.
The conversion of video content in the form of a video message, for example, WO2008/048848 describes converting a video message to a MMS, the transformation being based on mobile device capability.
It should be noted that a MMS message, that allows sending messages that include multimedia objects (images, audio, video, rich text), is sent in a different manner to a SMS message, which only supports data in the form of text.